Praful Agrawal

Secretory

The cycles and seasons of this school work in tune with nature. As I pen these words, the monsoon clouds are starting to gather for the annual renewal of life in the forest behind our school. Looking around the beautiful surroundings of the OIPS campus reminds me that, as an educator, Rabindranath Tagore's educational experiment at Shantiniketan was surely one of my earliest and most profound influences. I think it is important to be aware of Tagore's tremendously original understanding of education, very different from Western ideas of his time. How amazingly his ideas have spread and stimulated new thinking about learning, all around the globe. Our OIPS programme is in no small measure an outcome of his genuinely original view of education. Teachers model this and other important aspects of learning by being active, inquiring students themselves, rather than posing as the supposed founts of knowledge, authoritarian judges and stern masters which teachers were expected to be, not only in Tagore's day but even in the memory of the parents of our current generation of students," OIPS students know that their teachers are indeed behind them, ready to support them and guide them.